


Blades Are Hidden In Beautiful Smiles

by kynikos



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - The Fire Nation Won, F/F, Fire Nation (Avatar), Politics, azula has big brain and runs the fire nation singlehanded
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:41:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26558332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kynikos/pseuds/kynikos
Summary: The Fire Nation won the war. And Azula runs it with all the competence and impatience in the world. It's like having an anthill, sometimes; you watch the little people run around, and you control them and play with them like a mostly-benevolent god.A collection of barely-related oneshots I wrote after being interested in the concept of this AU. I will add onto it as I see fit (mostly when I can't write anything else).(Title inspired by 'where the stars do not take sides' by WitchofEndor.)
Relationships: Azula/Mai (Avatar)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 54





	Blades Are Hidden In Beautiful Smiles

**Author's Note:**

> We diverged from canon somewhere around the time Zuko tried to join the Gaang. Instead of teaching Aang firebending, he died somehow. So Ozai won. And then very quickly died in his sleep.

It’s fascinating to her how the other people move. She watches them as one might watch ants in a glass, performing tasks and interacting with each other and going about their lives. It was interesting from a certain point of view – a bird’s eye, god’s eye point of view – but it seemed like it would be incredibly _boring_ to live such a life.

And so she watched, trying to understand.

Lord Tzin came to her, asking for approval (and money, which of course was all he really wanted) for a naval base on an island just west of Kyoshi. She denied his request as soon as his mouth closed, and he left the room furious but of course completely unable to do anything to _her_ about it.

Commander Aoke – the next in line for an audience with the Fire Lord – knelt at the foot of the throne and asked for an additional three hundred soldiers from the Capital City garrison to quell an insurrection at one of the air temples. She said no. He gaped, and said, ‘But, your majesty, perhaps you have not heard that—’

‘Not interested,’ she told him. ‘Your request is denied.’

And so he left in a rage.

Lord Zaiko was next. He asked permission to take an expeditionary force of five hundred men and six ships, and search for Water Tribe loyalists in the South Pole. The Water Tribe had been scattered for five years; this was common knowledge, as was the fact that Zaiko was an idiot who needed an aide to help him with his boots on in the morning. Azula yawned and assented to his imbecilic request. The various scribes and attendants frowned but dared say nothing.

Sojen, her advisor, was the last for the day. All he had come for was to tell her that the imports from the farms in the east were down six and a half percent.

‘Oh, Sojen? Arrest a man wearing a red flower in his sleeve,’ Azula told him as he was about to leave. ‘He’ll be somewhere in the Lower Ring of Ba Sing Se the day after tomorrow. Be discreet while searching for him. When you find him, kill him.’

‘Yes, your majesty,’ Sojen answered, not daring to ask why or how. He bowed, and took his leave, and that was all.

And the servants, and her advisors, and most of the world who had any sort of interaction with her muttered that she gave orders on a whim – that she denied and approved requests for no reason whatsoever – that she never even let the supplicants talk – that she was _insane_ —

But Lord Tzin had a secretary named Shu, whom he screamed at (and often beat) when he was angry. And Shu was engaged to a man named Laizin, who was a soldier in the Capital garrison. And Laizin, when he wasn’t on duty, ran a small smuggling job on the side, in Ba Sing Se. And one of his buyers was a Red Camellia resistance fighter, who bought blasting powder and used it on Fire Nation supply lines to and from the farms in the east.

And Azula knew that Laizin (the Capital City soldier who would _not_ be leaving the Fire Nation) would send a hawk to his buyer in Ba Sing Se as soon as he heard his commander’s mission had been canceled, to say that the deal was on.

And Azula knew that when Shu (Tzin’s secretary who would certainly find themselves on the receiving end of their master’s fury) was in a bad mood, Laizin took them to the Sixth Lotus for dinner, without fail, even at the cost of reneging on a deal with one of his buyers.

And Azula knew that the resistance fighter was one of two people, based on the limited information to which she had access. _One_ of these people – the one she suspected less – was another soldier, who served under Zaiko. And that man was being sent away to hunt for imaginary Water Tribespeople.

So Azula knew that there would probably be a man with a red camellia in his sleeve, wandering around the Lower Ring of Ba Sing Se, waiting for a shipment of blasting powder that wouldn’t arrive (because the delivery man would be comforting an unhappy secretary).

Azula didn’t need to get rid of _all_ smugglers. She was well aware that the Fire Nation’s economy was tenuous at best, especially after the war, and the smuggling trade was keeping it alive. She just needed to get rid of the ones who planned to destroy her nation’s food supply lines.

Because apparently the imports from the farms in the east were down six and a half percent.

And ‘the Red Camellia’ was a ridiculous name for an organization anyway.

And she kept watching, because surely her actions weren't as crazy or complex as everyone seemed to think they were. Surely they weren't _all_ mindless drones, grinding out their lives moving three steps behind. 

* * *

‘You have something of your father in your eyes,’ Lord Shai said over his steaming cup of tea. He and Azula were across the table from each other: he straight as a rod, formal and stiff and disapproving, while Azula _lounged_ with as much coiled ferocity as a resting tiger. She had taken no tea. In fact she had had nothing at all to eat or drink. She had no doubt Shai assumed she was sending a message. There were any number of messages she could have been sending, ranging from the stupidly obvious ‘the food is poisoned’, to the indirect insult ‘I will not eat with you’, to the peak of subtle communication ‘I do not concern myself over the remnants of the Water Tribe nearly as much as you do’.

(She didn’t think he would dig that deep into the meaning. It went like this: the tea was jasmine and the cakes were baked with sea prunes, a Southern fruit (or creature, she still wasn’t sure) that had become a sort of Fire Nation novelty/delicacy. Jasmine, when presented in a bouquet, almost always signified respect; by serving it to him in tea, it could be taken to mean he respected something she didn’t. And, since the only other item was baked with a Southern food which had been essentially taken from their culture by force, it wasn’t too great a jump to take it to mean that _she_ thought that _he_ thought that they were a much greater threat than they were.)

He probably wouldn’t go with that particular interpretation of her mind games. But, whatever he thought she was trying to convey, it seemed to be bothering him, if the thin sheen of sweat over his temples was any indicator. Azula felt like she knew this man inside and out. She already knew it would be all too easy to get under his skin, which made the game no fun anymore. She felt suddenly bored.

And they had hardly even spoken yet.

‘Is that so,’ she said.

(Now that she thought about it, jasmine could also mean sensuality. She assumed that wasn’t anywhere in the conceivable range of interpretations this sweating idiot would take, but just to be sure she shook a lock of hair loose above her left ear – the mark of a married or otherwise unavailable woman in the province from which Shai had originally come.)

* * *

It was a dinner in her honor. Which explained why she felt so on edge. She agreed with Mai’s whispered ‘this is _boring_ ’, which summed up her emotions much more eloquently than anything she was thinking.

Mai was on her right and a lord was on her left. She had sat in such a way to present the lord – who was a minor opponent in the elaborate pai-sho game that was her council – with nothing more than a shoulder and a stone-cold profile. She made small talk to Mai, when she could think of something to say; Mai, in response, gave either a ‘mm’ or a ‘hmm’, which seemed to be the extent of her conversation that night.

‘Your majesty,’ the lord she had been ignoring finally said. The rest of the table stopped their muted conversations entirely and focused on the man speaking. ‘The council has an… unusual query.’

She flashed a brilliant, toothy smile along the full length of the table. ‘Indeed.’ She knew what was coming. Well, she knew of eighteen _potential_ things that were coming – ranging in seriousness from a full-blown coup (number four) to an observation about her new hairstyle and how _becoming_ and _Fire Nation-y_ it was (number sixteen).

‘It is customary for a Fire Lord to raise an heir.’

Ah. Number seven.

‘Indeed,’ she said again, as bland as the unseasoned rice lying untouched on her plate.

‘And you are reaching the age at which it is usual for the Fire Lord to be wed.’ The man looked as if he was waiting for a response, but Azula said nothing. ‘The council has… the council wonders whether you have an eye, as it were, on a prospective consort.’

‘Ah,’ said Azula, and sipped at her dragondraw. She let the silence drag out for _just_ one moment more than was comfortable, then said, ‘As a matter of fact, I have.’

‘Very good!’ the lord said, though his face said otherwise. His face, in fact, said a lot independent of his mouth, something along the lines of _you conniving bitch, finding someone to strengthen your position in this nation’s government without so much as letting the council know, you won’t get away with this in the meeting chambers_.

‘Yes,’ Azula went on. ‘In fact, we have already discussed marriage.’

‘…really?’ the lord said, faltering even further. He rallied commendably, however. ‘This is wonderful news!’

‘And she has said yes.’

And that was it, wasn’t it? She had planned out this moment for months, envisioning a multitude of possible scenarios and places to drop this bomb into the midst of the council. She had tried to convince herself of the strategic value of such a revelation, tried to tell herself that there were so many ways to use this confusion to her advantage.

But the truth was that she got bored, up there on the throne, and the act of telling two dozen old Fire Nation dignitaries from _Ozai’s regime_ that the new Fire Lord was _gay_ was… amusing. It was like setting your anthill on fire just to watch them run around and try to put it out.

So she watched the silent, slow explosion make its way from the quickest thinkers to the slower ones, down to the end of the table where Zaiko sat toying with a roll and not really paying attention. Not many of them dared show outrage on their faces, outright, but none of them could quite hide it either. She had a quick eye, so she took note of which ones thought what.

Finally the lord to her left – and now, so late into the dinner, she realized she didn’t even know his name – cleared his throat and tried to regain whatever composure he had had going in. ‘You have my congratulations, your majesty,’ he said valiantly. ‘Do you grant us the honor of knowing who…’

‘Mai, here,’ she said, waving her hand limply to the right. ‘The daughter of the governor of New Ozai.’

It was General Szati, near the end of the table, who _reacted_ first. ‘This is impossible,’ he shouted, standing and throwing his chair back. ‘The Fire Lord cannot be… cannot have…’

Azula hardly looked in his direction. ‘Cannot what, exactly, General?’ she asked. ‘I wonder whether you would have shown this disrespect to my father.’

‘Fire Lord Ozai was not a…’ the General hissed, but stopped short. He met Azula’s eyes and his nose actually wrinkled. He sat, fuming.

‘Regardless of what my father was or was not,’ Azula continued, ‘I will be wed as I choose and please.’

‘And in terms of an heir,’ the lord on her left murmured, hands wringing. He looked almost embarrassed.

‘A concern for another time,’ Azula said, and her tone brooked no reproach. The meal resumed, and the rest of the dinner was just as boring as the start.

(What happened _after_ dinner, in her room, with her newly-announced fiancée, was not boring at all, and a thousand times more pleasurable.)

(General Szati was found to have died in his sleep, the next day.)

(‘ _That’s_ where you went?’ Mai asked, when they were told the news. ‘Wow. Way to kill the glow.’)


End file.
